A 6-year trial for victims’ kin
The jury came back in a day - long before most people expected.
After more than six years of waiting, Henry Clements couldn’t get back to the Hall of Justice in Kelso fast enough. He was the last one seated before the jury filed in one last time. Guilty, they said. Frederick Russell was guilty of vehicular homicide and assault in the deaths of three Washington State University students and the injuries of three others in a crash on Highway 270 near Pullman in June 2001.
Russell, 28, who is expected to appeal, faces up to 14 years in prison.
After his arrest and release on bail in 2001, Russell fled to Ireland, where he lived until he was discovered in 2005 and extradited to the United States a year later.
So for six years, three sets of grief-stricken parents waited, their hearts and minds in a lovelorn limbo, anger and loss moving in and out like the tide.
At the courthouse Monday, Clements, 54, told me of the thousand walks he took around his 37-acre farm in Yakima County, thinking about his son, Brandon. The 22-year-old was a year away from a chemical-engineering degree when he died in the crash with friends Stacy Morrow, 21, and Ryan Sorensen, 21.
“I had to go out in the pasture and set and ponder through the loss,” Clements said. “The emptiness is what gets you.”
Not only was his son gone, but so, too, was the man responsible. No defendant, no justice. Just years stretching out before him.
After Tuesday’s verdict, Clements couldn’t really pinpoint how it felt for the wait to be over, and Brandon’s death avenged by the legal system.
“I guess I have lightened up a portion,” he said. “I feel different walking. But I still have no real appetite.”
Rich Morrow, Stacy’s father, called the experience “excruciating.” He drove to Kelso from West Seattle for the two-week trial, staying at the Motel 6, where repeated testimony about the crash revived long-dormant nightmares. “This has just been, I don’t know, losing Stacy was the worst thing,” he said, looking out at the Cowlitz River, beside the courthouse.
“But this little circus … .”
Since lawyers felt publicity had spoiled potential jurors, Russell’s trial was moved from Whitman to Cowlitz County.
“Every time we thought we were going straight forward,” he said, “we went sideways.”
While he waited for the trial, Morrow - who had quit smoking 10 days before the crash - took again to his Marlboros, started speaking to victims’ groups and thought a lot about forgiveness.
“Talk about a test of faith,” Morrow said of the wait. “I was mad; I was questioning the whole issue of forgiveness, the when and how.”
He even went to a conference on the issue, and learned he didn’t have the heart to hate.
“I am in readiness to forgive,” he said. “It doesn’t make me very happy to see a young man being sent away.”
Clements still waits for one last thing: to hear something out of Russell. A letter recounting the events that night or maybe, just maybe, an apology.
It may never happen. But Clements knows patience.
“I have nothing but time.”
Nicole Brodeur’s column appears Tuesday and Friday. Reach her at 206-464-2334 or nbrodeur@seattletimes.com.
So that’s what a coward looks like.